Friday, March 30, 2012

the Fire Sermon

the Fire Sermon

the Buddha addresses his followers in the Quiet Grove,a stand of old white trees overlooking the Summer Sea.

the birds flash in the fever of living,dark forms chattering around the boughsof the summer tree, the first bird speaking in its crown,sunlight and shade dappling the green into many greens,a cool blue haze under the canopy,leaves whispering in the ocean breeze;they burn with the inner word,flames of the inmost seekerthat touch the tongue and burninto articulate speech, the first word,the genesis tongue. the sunflames whitely at zenith, standing guardabove distant mountains and the sea;in the drowsy heat we forget ourselves,our words, we sleep; birds flicker around us,their calls breaking the air,turning and whispering in wild unknowing.they pattern the air, eclipsing themselvesin restless hunger,consuming small insect fires, chatteringtheir words like flames.the world is fire.

from dark hills broken by riversdown to rocks breaking the sand,the eye sees not stones but frozen music,the dance burning so fast and slowthat to our short-seeing eyes it seems motionless,more solid to the touch than the hand itself.but the stones are dancingin Shiva’s fire; they vibrate in placelike shivering lakes dancing in rain,humming to themselves of roaring fires,each atom remembering the forge of exploding suns,the refuge light of the sky’s red underglow;the eye sees vibrating chalices of lightand believes it sees silent stone,but the stone burns.the world is fire.

in the blue canopy of treessulfur butterflies hum, wings rhythmically beating,pulsing so fast that face-on, edge-on, face-on,they seem to blink in and out of being,a flicker in blue air;the butterfly swims in the hot sea of unknowing,the forever thirst that sends it flickeringand blinking from flower to leaf to flower,drinking passionate wine, never replete, never filled;sulfur and black, mute and restive,feel the burning, feel what makes them quickly breatheuntil they breathlessly fall, mouthparts and mandiblesnever still, never motionlessly poised and waitinglike the silent hunter mantis, always floweringand flickering from point to pointon the burning matrix of day.they dance, unknowing, breaking themselveson the sun, the hard white edges of the air.the world is fire.

the patient mantis well knows the fireand remains poised, still,waiting, knowing that the fireflowwill bring the prayer close by,when it will strike with speed that beats the eye.the mantis sees the fireflow itself through infinite eyes,all things as they truly are,knots of fire flowing in the fields of fire,bright lines in matrices of shivering flame,tossed here and there by the field’s hard dancing;though all believe they give themselves direction, they do not.the mantis without motion is the observer of all that movesin Shiva’s dancing, light, the play of flames,the god’s burning gaze; the mantis is most reverent audience.this is what it knows; this is why it prays.the mantis without eyes sees deeper than the eyes of fire.this is why we fear the mantis: it knowsthe world is fire.

as we move beneath the trees, as the breeze stirs its branches,the sun dapples through sheltering leavesshatter in our eyes, blinding us with spatters of light;the greater glare beyond, reflected light blazing on still water,blazes white in the eye, burning vision black;the moon is lit by the sun, and lights the sunless plains;the finger points to the moon, and foolishlywe imagine there is a connectionbetween the moon and the pointing finger; looking away,red and green afterimages spin in our gaze,the field of vision darkens, bluely, dizzily,like the sky during an eclipse, smothering death of light.an eclipse of fire is the sun floating in fire,moon floating between, a knotted light,darkening, and we imagine it opaque.light into shadow into light.lightning spills over into visibilityand we are blinded and deaf, we do not lookupon the god with wonder.but the trees have not moved, except as they always move,we have moved through the light beneath them.is it the wind that trembles their leaves,or the leaves that make the wind? it is the mind’s movingthat shapes the air, that the leaves turn within.our eyes drown in their light; our feetburn on the fiery sands.the world is fire.

on the beach, rocks break from white sandlike dolphins arcing into sky,the sun crashes on stones,sands white and fierce as snow,snow blind and white like the disused eyes of a beggar child,like the mute glow of the cave salamander that has never seen,that would die in the light;mountain snow softening and meltedby its own trapped heat and the sun’s hammer,raging white, turning to clear crystal riversdancing with searing points of reflected sun,flowing cold enough to burn the skinwhere you bathe in the headwaters by the ice,river breaking on the stones, flowing closertill it spills into the summer sea,warm now with long light, the body’s own endless fever.light breaks water into vapor,hot sun feeds the trees that hold the riverbank,filling the air with cool sweet exhalation;now, beneath the sun, ocean steams,and there will come soft rains out of the burning clouds,falling everywhere and always, washing away like tears.the world is fire.

like prayers spoken in the wind,the whale sings, the fish thrum,songs hot in the ocean’s cold ground;waters cannot cool them, though they freeze.they dance in the blazing watersand are blind.cold salt wind burns the lungs, is bracing on the skin,to hold ice burns the hand;in the shores of ice, shoals of krillreef and blow in cold currents,endlessly swimming like seabirds diving through the air,glowing with inner harvest light, engulfed by the feeding whale;whale sighs as it sings, breathes deep,rolls and dives, crying, mourning those who danceto Shiva’s drum and do not know they dance,whirling in the heartbeat light till sweat bursts out, skin burnswith fever, they glow to the fiery heat of the dance,and collapsing wonder why the world spins about them;the whale knows how they fall off the crest of the waveand believe the world has gone awry, gone out beneath them,because they feel it moving nowand do not ride with it; in that moment,the falling, the fainting, they see,see truly, just a flash, one terrible moment,see what the mantis sees.the whale hears, and sings it; the song will always ring,even when the whale has gone. even from the edge of the fire desert,the god hears; the god drums it, eyes glowing red and hot.the world is fire.

we too, we too, we also.we also rise and turn and look about in flames,stone coals in the earthlight;we feel it through the veil of flames,perhaps only one forever awful moment,when we sit beneath the canopies of treesby the oceanside, where cold salt windsdrift in to mute the hot, heavy sunlightand the searing blue sky, young birds crying,butterflies in the blossoms overhead,when we sit and see whales breaching in the bay,in the silent blue distance across the wind-cut water,and do not hear them in the silence of sun and breeze and surf,though they hear us, hearing instead the deeper roarof the world’s slow unwinding, down to deeper silenceand dark cold, mountains slowly ringing,crumbling in the light, when we begin to look through the cracksin the wall of the world, that wall the eye builtto have something to see—look through the cracksand find a door, a window, a changing of the light,a view into what the falling have seenas they fall, see what the mantis sees;the fire burns us and we shiver with inner cold.

one said that we must learn to put the fire out.another said it is the refiner’s fire,the hot forging that would harden and reshape us.i do not know; some days the flames are cooling,some days incandescent. i have burned my feetupon the icy plain of wind-shaped stonesand must now sit quietly.but Shiva never stops dancing, never stops smiling,the drum and bell pulse in the blood forever,and the god’s eyes glow fiery as he gazes out on us,the flames dancing in his hand.it is not cruelty, or anger, or passionate love.it is not pain, not joy, not weeping, not peace or war.it is what stands behind all these,the fire of living, the power under life.it is the fire.the world is fire.